Posted on 04/18/2008 1:24:43 PM PDT by pabianice
This is actually getting interesting. Yesterday we noted the weird story of Aliza Shvarts, an undergraduate student at Yale whose "senior art project" supposedly consists in part of her own blood, which she claims she obtained by repeatedly inducing miscarriages after artificially inseminating herself.
Suspecting that the Shvarts project was a hoax, we described it as a "sick joke," which covered our bases in either case. Now a dispute has arisen between the Yale administration, which claims it was a hoax, and Shvarts, who denies it, although she now describes the putative project in somewhat less sensational terms.
Let's go through this step by step. Yesterday, after the initial Yale Daily News report prompted nationwide outrage (thanks to Matt Drudge), Yale spokesman Helaine S. Klasky put out the following statement:
Ms. Shvarts is engaged in performance art. Her art project includes visual representations, a press release and other narrative materials. She stated to three senior Yale University officials today, including two deans, that she did not impregnate herself and that she did not induce any miscarriages. The entire project is an art piece, a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman's body.
She is an artist and has the right to express herself through performance art.
Had these acts been real, they would have violated basic ethical standards and raised serious mental and physical health concerns.
But today's Yale Daily News has Shvarts telling quite a different story:
While Shvarts stood by her project and claimed that administrators had backed her before the planned exhibition attracted national condemnation, the University dismissed it as nothing more than a piece of fiction. . . .
In an interview later Thursday afternoon, Shvarts defended her work and called the University's statement "ultimately inaccurate." She reiterated that she engaged in the nine-month process she publicized on Wednesday in a press release that was first reported in the News: repeatedly using a needleless syringe to insert semen into herself, then taking abortifacient herbs at the end of her menstrual cycle to induce bleeding. Thursday evening, in a tour of her art studio, she shared with the News video footage she claimed depicted her attempts at self-induced miscarriages. "No one can say with 100-percent certainty that anything in the piece did or did not happen," Shvarts said, adding that she does not know whether she was ever pregnant. "The nature of the piece is that it did not consist of certainties."
Well, that certainly clears things up.
What we find most fascinating about all this is the Yale administration's claim that if the project was on the level, it "would have violated basic ethical standards." Roger Kimball asks the obvious question:
What, by the way, was the standard being violated? I wonder, for example, whether the Yale spokesman would say that abortion itself violated a basic ethical standard? Or maybe the violation requires first deliberately impregnating oneself? (But why would that affect the "basic ethical standard" involved?) Or maybe it was videotaping the performance that was the problem? It seems to us that Yale is hiding behind the ambiguity of the word ethical. There are two different kinds of ethical systems, and it isn't clear which kind Yale is applying here: a moral doctrine (that is, a theory about right and wrong, which applies to everyone) or a code of professional conduct (which applies only to people within a profession or even a particular institution).
There is significant overlap between the two types of ethical systems. The injunction to physicians to "first, do no harm" is easy to understand as both a moral injunction and a professional rule of conduct. But there are cases in which the two types of ethics come into conflict. Suppose a parishioner confesses to his priest that he is guilty of a murder for which someone else has been falsely convicted. Most people would surely think that in this case priestly ethics, which demand confessions remain confidential, give way to a higher moral imperative.
When Yale says that Shvarts's project, "if real," violates "basic ethical standards," what kind of ethical standards does it have in mind?
It seems unlikely that Yale is making a moral claim against the putative Shvarts project. The abortion debate is driven by two irreconcilable moral premises: on the antiabortion side, that it is wrong to take a human life deliberately at any stage of development; on the pro-abortion side, that a woman has a right to do whatever she wants with her body.
In practice, most people's actual positions on abortion amount to a compromise between these two absolutes. If Yale has an institutional view on abortion, surely it is closer to the pro- than the antiabortion side. And if Shvarts did what she claims to have done, she destroyed protohumans (for want of a better neutral term) no later than the embryonic stage of development--a stage at which, according to the U.S. Supreme Court, a woman has an absolute "constitutional" right to terminate her pregnancy.
Is Yale claiming that Shvarts violated academic ethics? This is a real head-scratcher. Academic ethics center on honesty; its most important prohibitions are against actions as falsification of data or plagiarism (misrepresenting another's work as one's own). But Yale is claiming that Shvarts's project violated "basic ethical standards" if she was honest in describing it. If Shvarts perpetrated a hoax, then according to Yale she was exercising "the right to express herself." The implication is that if she was lying, she was behaving ethically.
Yale therefore is either taking a moral position in opposition to abortion or standing academic ethics on their head. Which raises an intriguing possibility: Could it be that Aliza Shvarts is an opponent of abortion who has staged a hoax aimed at embarrassing those who support or countenance abortion?
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